Existing cards rebadged with a different model numbers?!!!!!11shiftone

Shock. Horror. Rage.

This thread isn't nearly vitriolic enough about evil marketing geniuses. I expect to see some more hate here. People have an image of neutrality to maintain in the war of red versus green. So let's see it: "Bad AMD! No cookie!"

"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We're so glad you could attend. Come inside! Come inside!"

It is a poor move from a customer's perspective. However, it's one that we've known about for a while so that tones done any shock and horror. I'm sure it will catch some people. Heck, I know I've had a hard time keeping track of the relative performance of Nvidia's cards with their renaming/rebadging in the past.

Ryu Connor wrote:Existing cards rebadged with a different model numbers?!!!!!11shiftone

Shock. Horror. Rage.

This thread isn't nearly vitriolic enough about evil marketing geniuses. I expect to see some more hate here. People have an image of neutrality to maintain in the war of red versus green. So let's see it: "Bad AMD! No cookie!"

It's a deceiving marketing tactic. Why are you defending it by trying to devalue other's dislike of it? People shouldn't be upset just because it's common? It's not common knowledge at all to most shoppers and it fools many every new graphics card refresh. Maybe as enthusiasts we should complain more to stop it? Just maybe...

Yup. The 8970 and 7970 have identical specs. Same number of stream processors and texture/ROP units, same memory bus width, etc.

This blatant rebadging was supposedly done at the behest of OEMs that wanted to help their marketing potential. As such, these should only be available to OEMs like HP, Dell, etc. So you now have a situation where small time system builders won't be able to compete with larger OEMs on an even playing field as they won't have access to these apparently more appealingly branded HD 7000 products. Ugh.

I don't see the point. I think the whole business of releasing identical parts with different names is at least a bit shady, no matter who does it, or for what reason. All it does is create misinformation about the product you are actually buying. And at worst, you "trick" unsuspecting buyers into buying a Dell (or whatever) with an HD 8970 over another system with an HD 7970 (when the two are in fact identical), perhaps even when the Dell is more expensive - which is the only conceivable rationale behind such a move. This reeks of being contrary to consumer rights.

There should be some kind of FTC rule that if a product is 100% identical to an already marketed product, it can't be released to market with a different name, and at the very least, not until a specific amount of time (6 months?) has elapsed since the last product with the original name has been shipped to retail. Such a time gap in availability of the product on the market and resulting lapse in sales would surely discourage such practices.

Unfortunately, this would require such a governing body to be educated on the intricacies/details of all products - which as we've seen with the patent office, doesn't always pan out so well in the technology sector.

The REAL HD 8000 series is supposed to start appearing at the end of 2013. But who knows what it will be called by then... Probably HD 9000 I guess?

Edit: Somewhat ironically, I think the 7790 was supposed to be a lower mid-range 8000 series card, but because the rest of the updates were pushed back until the end of this year, it was given a 7000 series name.

With the positioning of these model numbers, I'd guess that the next generation of AMD GPUs is likely to jump right out of the Radeon HD8000 series. HD9000 seems as reasonable a guess as anything at this point.

Once AMD launches (or rebadges) the 8000 series, model numbers will have come one complete circle since the days I first started gaming (the days of the Radeon 8500 Pro, although my first card was a Rage 128 Pro or someting like that).

flip-mode wrote:Once AMD launches (or rebadges) the 8000 series, model numbers will have come one complete circle since the days I first started gaming (the days of the Radeon 8500 Pro, although my first card was a Rage 128 Pro or someting like that).

At my parents' house, in their garage, I used to have boxes and boxes of old hardware I'd acquired from various places, including a few of my and my brother's old PCs. All of my gaming hardware when I was little was hand-me-downs from my (9 years older) brother, so I was perpetually a generation or two out of date until I parted out and built my first machine myself when I was 17.

Recently, my mom threw all of that stuff away. Just threw it in the garbage pile; had the trash man come pick it up. Sigh...

wintermane666 wrote:The difference is when NVidia recycles a chip design they almost always put it in lower in the lineup. So a 240 became a 330 a 460 became a 550 and so on.

How is that significant in any way? Case in point: Not too long ago, a certain large online retailer had 2 bottom end Nvidia discrete GPUs listed side by side (Edit of the same brand). One was a gt 530, the other a gt 620. The GPUs are identical. However, the 530 was $50 and the other was $60. So how exactly does giving the 600 series part a "20" suffix and the 500 series part a "30" suffix help at all? It does absolutely nothing for the potential customer.

I think the big difference here is that these rebadged 8000 parts are only available to certain OEMs and not to the general market. This is a first and kind of suggests that AMD didn't want to do it, but was desperate not to loose sales to certain OEMs... Not that that makes it better.

Ryu Connor wrote:Existing cards rebadged with a different model numbers?!!!!!11shiftone

Shock. Horror. Rage.

This thread isn't nearly vitriolic enough about evil marketing geniuses. I expect to see some more hate here. People have an image of neutrality to maintain in the war of red versus green. So let's see it: "Bad AMD! No cookie!"

wintermane666 wrote:The difference is when NVidia recycles a chip design they almost always put it in lower in the lineup. So a 240 became a 330 a 460 became a 550 and so on.

How is that significant in any way? Case in point: Not too long ago, a certain large online retailer had 2 bottom end Nvidia discrete GPUs listed side by side (Edit of the same brand). One was a gt 530, the other a gt 620. The GPUs are identical. However, the 530 was $50 and the other was $60. So how exactly does giving the 600 series part a "20" suffix and the 500 series part a "30" suffix help at all? It does absolutely nothing for the potential customer.

I think the big difference here is that these rebadged 8000 parts are only available to certain OEMs and not to the general market. This is a first and kind of suggests that AMD didn't want to do it, but was desperate not to loose sales to certain OEMs... Not that that makes it better.

That's mostly the market and not NVidia they set the new card to drop down below the price of the old and replace it but that takes time.

nVidia video drivers FAIL, click for more infoDisclaimer: All answers and suggestions are provided by an enthusiastic amateur and are therefore without warranty either explicit or implicit. Basically you use my suggestions at your own risk.

Who knows when the true 8xxx series will come out or what it will be called - but doing this isn't a wise course of action.I just hope they skip 8xxx all together now and brand the new stuff something else. Looks like we're heading in to a 2 year cycle. I hope the PS4 and X720 cash has helped keep them alive.

This seems like a crock to me. I'm already on the fence about getting a 7850/7870 from my 6870 (because I know the 8xxx are coming and it's not a huge jump) and if they are on this path it's a major turnoff unless the prices come down considerably. It's bad enough my 6870 is a 5850 and I didn't even realize that until recently.

Who knows when the true 8xxx series will come out or what it will be called - but doing this isn't a wise course of action.I just hope they skip 8xxx all together now and brand the new stuff something else. Looks like we're heading in to a 2 year cycle. I hope the PS4 and X720 cash has helped keep them alive.

Why?Because Geforce 300 series, that's why. Or how about the Geforce 9000 series?

As for the true next gen GPUs from AMD, the rumours say either late this year or early 2014. With the cut down titan version and beefed GTX 680, nvidia will hold this year's performance crown at the high end and possibly mid end with the GTX 760 Ti. The rumour is that nvidia will launch the cards at the end of May around Computex. Personally i'm interested to see the refreshed lineup and how price drops on old cards.

Last edited by Arclight on Sun Apr 28, 2013 12:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.

nVidia video drivers FAIL, click for more infoDisclaimer: All answers and suggestions are provided by an enthusiastic amateur and are therefore without warranty either explicit or implicit. Basically you use my suggestions at your own risk.

Savyg wrote: I'm already on the fence about getting a 7850/7870 from my 6870. It's bad enough my 6870 is a 5850 and I didn't even realize that until recently.

Although the hot-clocked versions of Radeon HD6850 or stock HD6870 cards offer performance similar to Radeon HD5850 in most games, they use different processors to get the job done. Radeon HD5850 & 5870 use the Cypress GPU. Radeon HD6850 &6870 use the Barts GPU. You could even get similar performance to a Radeon HD5850 with a hot-clocked GeForce GTX460.

If you have a Radeon HD6870 now and everything runs to your satisfaction until the end of the year, you may be able to skip the current generation. If you need a new graphics card now, just pick the best value available today that provides the performance improvement that you need.

ClickClick5 wrote:I'm already on the fence about getting a 7850/7870 from my 6870 (because I know the 8xxx are coming and it's not a huge jump) . It's bad enough my 6870 is a 5850 and I didn't even realize that until recently.

The HD6000 series doesn't receive any real driver performance improvements because GCN is all AMD's driver team is concerned about right now. I'd take the jump, the reduction in frame latency with the latest GPU families makes the upgrade well worth the money.

Most games it seemed like a roughly 10-15% improvement so why bother...and so many dx9 games still coming out don't help the case for it. If I could afford a 79xx it'd be worth it.

I know I'm switching to the PS4 even though I'm not expecting it to be considerably better than my 6870 in graphics capability, since it won't have 32 bit OSes or dx9 or x87 code or any of the other ridiculousness we've come to expect from PC games.

With Radeon HD7950 3GB cards available this week for under $250 AR with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Crysis 3 and Bioshock Infinite, how much cheaper do they need to be?

$250 after rebate is still $270+ before rebate. You don't magically get to pay the after-rebate price. All those free games are nice, for sure, but what if you already own them, or don't want them? I sure don't care about any of those.

If I hadn't been gifted my current GPU I'd be looking real hard at one of those 7950s, but I'd probably still be chugging along on a single GTX 460. GPUs are expensive and some people are poor! (T_T)